You can't plant a lemon seed to grow a lemon tree

Growing a fruit tree from fruit seed is unlikely to produce a plant that will yield edible fruit. Fruit varieties grown today are the results of years, even decades, of breeding to create that supersweet apricot or seedless grape.

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By
MAUREEN GILMER
Posted Jul. 23, 2013 @ 2:16 pm

You can't plant a lemon

seed to grow a lemon tree. Sure, that seed will grow, but it probably

won't produce fruit. Yet day after day I see these ideas online,

presented as though they were viable options. Perhaps it's just young

folks with little gardening under their belts hoping to find a trendy

new way to grow things.

Fruit seed is the result of sexual

reproduction in plants, which, like human children, are each a unique

creation. Asexual propagation of a fruit tree is making a copy of the

original that is genetically identical, just like a clone. Here's why

you need to understand the difference:

Let's say that seed came

from a Meyer lemon, which was discovered by Frank Meyer around 1908.

Plants were brought from China to the U.S., where they were grown to

yield lots of cuttings for identical copies of the original plant. Often

these are grafted onto a rootstock to create marketable plants using

less plant material.

While this lemon plant produces consistently

good fruit, the seed inside that fruit should be considered a whole new

variety that is yet unknown. Each seed will contain an unpredictable

collection of genetic traits gleaned from a much larger gene pool. These